Each of the stories in Alice Munro's new collection, Too Much Happiness (Knopf), reads like a novel, not in miniature, but—miraculously, magically— in full. The title story was inspired by Munro's chance discovery of, and obsession with, the late-nineteenth-century Russian mathematician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky. The novella- length tale focuses on her final days, using flashbacks to flesh out the extraordinary life and times of this brilliant, virtually forgotten visionary. Writes Munro of the widowed Kovalevsky's complex relationship with fellow intellectual and former in-law Maksim Kovalevsky, whom she first met in Sweden in 1888: "They flew at each other as if they had indeed been longlost relatives. A torrent of jokes and questions followed, an immediate understanding, a rich gabble of Russian, as if the languages of Western Europe had been flimsy formal cages in which they had been too long confined, or paltry substitutes for true human speech. Their behavior, as well, soon overflowed the proprieties of Stockholm. He stayed late at her apartment. She went alone to lunch with him at his hotel."

The nine other stories in the much-lauded Canadian writer's twelfth collection—her many titles include The Love of a Good Woman, The View from Castle Rock, Runaway, and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage—delve lustily into the fleeting delights and more durable disturbances of the human condition. "Dimensions" bares the shocking choices a mother makes after her children are murdered by her criminally insane husband; the spookily suspenseful "Free Radicals" follows a standoff between an elderly woman and the stranger who invades her home; "Face" is a spellbinding portrait of a boy born with a port-wine-stain birthmark that covers half his face; and "Child's Play" concerns the ploys and plotting of a creepy kid who crows, "I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions."

That line, like this entire tour-de-force volume, is classic Munro—at once deep, devilish, and divine.